Wine and Warfare part 10: Rum and blood

Seldom Reaches Destination – the problem of na’poo rum

British troops celebrate Christmas Day on the Somme 1916. Rum was a key part of the celebrations and issued specially.

If the French army had wine, the British, like their navy, had rum and in the First World War its presence is felt everywhere, as ubiquitous as shellfire during the bloody battles of the First World War in northern France and Flanders as Britain’s first conscript army came face to face with modern warfare.

Rum (indeed alcohol generally) served three main purposes in the war: firstly as a morale booster; secondly as what is known as a “combat motivator” and, thirdly, very often as a coping mechanism and all three merged quite seamlessly into the other, their purposes over-lapping, as time progressed.

New Zealanders in their distinctive “lemon squeezer” hats receive their rum ration.

The famous “gunfire” ration was reintroduced by the British as a warmer during the first winter in the trenches of 1914/1915 and was quickly adopted by the “Dominion” forces (Canadian, Australian, South African and New Zealand) too.

As it came in at an eye-watering 54% abv, just a tot was meant to be added to tea or coffee in cold weather but it eventually became a daily ritual for troops on the frontline.

A memorandum to the Canadian overseas minister, Sir Albert Kemp, noted: “It is left to the discretion of the commanding officer as to whether oxo, soup or rum is required. As a general proposition, preference is expressed for the latter. The individual man is in all cases free to refuse the issue of rum if he so desires, but this option is only exercised in a few instances.”

The rum ration came in a large stoneware jar holding one full gallon of the spirit – enough for 64 men – stamped with the letters, S.R.D for Service Rations Depot.

It was dished out by an NCO usually under the watchful eye of an officer, sometimes not, twice a day at the dawn and dusk stand-tos (the times the enemy was most likely to attack). If the enemy made no appearance then the NCOs would serve the rum, each man receiving only 1/16th of a pint or a quarter gill in total which was generally considered to never be enough.

Like his French counterpart, the poliu, the British ‘Tommy’ and the Australian and New Zealand ‘Digger’ has always thrived on black humour and much of it in the First World War revolved around the quest to get hold of more rum.

Common rumour had it that most NCOs operated a “one for you, one for me” policy, whereby the jar would be finished (and the NCO either reeling drunk or fast asleep) before it had got round to every man but this is a myth. Although soldiers did drink themselves into oblivion behind the lines (at the infamous estaminets), at the front being found drunk at one’s post would result in severe punishment and it seems that there was never any instance of widespread drunkenness at the front.

Nonetheless, SRD quickly came to be known as, “Seldom Reaches Destination”, “Sergeants Rarely Deliver” and “Soon Runs Dry” among other names.

A popular trench song put the phenomenon to verse.

“If the sergeant drinks your rum, never mind
And your face may lose its smile, never mind
Though he’s just a bloody sot, he’s entitled to the lot
If the sergeant drinks your rum, never mind.”

The pursuit of rum (and the lack of it) was dealt with in the famous trench newspaper The Wipers Times.

It ran a serial in late 1916 into early 1917 entitled Narpoo Rum (“narpoo” or “na’poo” being an Anglicisation of “Il n’y a plus”, “there’s no more”, which featured highly in army slang at the time and was up there with, “Wipers” (Ypres) and “San Fairy Ann” (“ça ne fait rien”) in the Franglais lexicon of most Tommies).

Featuring the thinly disguised detective, “Herlock Shomes” and his assistant “Hotsam”, the series spanned five instalments, with Shomes searching for the brigade’s stolen rum ration around Ypres. Amusingly the veil sometimes slips and the characters are referred to outright as Holmes and Watson – the story may be considered non-canonical however by true fans of Conan Doyle’s sleuth.

The paper also frequently printed poems and fake letters complaining about the lack of rum, as well as prevailing rumours that a whisky “drought” is on the cards – Scotch being the officer’s preferred tipple and one they were allowed to keep in their dugouts at the front.

As with the French, although humour could alleviate some of the madness and suffering, drink was important to morale when the going got tough.

Once the thin façade of war’s “glory” had been roughly disabused and the troops were exposed to the grinding life of the trenches, with random shelling, sniper fire, gas attacks and rats a fact of daily life, then rum was part of a coping mechanism that many found essential.

David Jones in In Parenthesis writes of the rum ration being issued in rather desperately pathetic terms:

“The spirit of our troops is excellent”, the legendary wartime cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather on the soldiers’ appreciation of rum. Private soldiers did not have access to the rum ration which was normally under lock and key.

The First World War was really the first conflict where armies were in near constant contact with the other and the British suffered 7,000 men a day in the trenches killed, wounded or down with some kind of sickness or disease, the everyday “wastage” of war.

These sorts of losses were not at all uncommon to warfare but were magnified by the intensity and scale of the fighting.

The constant threat of death or mutilation, the smells and sights of dead flesh and near constant noise of artillery caused men to fall sick, break down and suffer the infamous “shell shock” if exposed to it for too long.

For the most part though the dangers (while not exaggerated by any means) were not always so intense that men were unable to complete their week’s rotation without cracking.

Commanders made sure that units spent three days to a week in the very front line having rotated through secondary lines before and after and then enjoying a week’s rest behind the battle zone.

Nonetheless, month after month of rotation, seeing terrible things, losing friends occasionally, living in a dirty hole and always aware of the danger posed by the enemy was enough to wear men down both mentally and physically.

Rum was a bright spot in an otherwise dull and dangerous life, “the brightest moment of their twenty-four hours,” in fact as Robert Graves noted of his soldiers.

Matters were made even more severe when members of the temperance movement at home, and sometimes in the army itself, tried to ban the rum ration on numerous occasions as they claimed it promoted alcoholism and was immoral (as opposed to killing men you’ve never met).

Its interference was not well received. Captain Alexander Stewart of the 3rd Cameronians made a particularly strong point on the matter: “The finest thing that ever happened in the trenches was the rum ration, and never was it more needed than on the Somme. Yet some blasted, ignorant fool of a general – damned in this world and the next – wanted to stop it and, for a time, did.

“The man must be worse than the lowest type of criminal, have no knowledge of the conditions in which troops exist, and be entirely out of touch with the men who are unfortunate enough to have him as their commander. He should have been taken up to the line and frozen in the mud. I would have very willingly sat on his head, as he was a danger to the whole army. Curse him.

“Those who have not spent a night standing or sitting or lying in mud with an east wind blowing and the temperature below freezing may think that I am extravagant in my abuse of the man who denied the soldiers their rum rations. Those who have will know I am too temperate.”

Siegfried Sassoon in his Memoirs of an Infantry Officer meanwhile, has non too kind words for a certain General Pinney of 33rd Division (immortalised as the “cheery old card” in Sassoon’s poem ‘The General‘) who not only banned the rum ration for troops under his command but also tried to ban cigarettes at one point. One former NCO remembered him as a “bun-pinching crank” and the 33rd was sometimes referred to as the ‘No Rum Division’ by other units who must have thanked their lucky stars their commanders weren’t tee-total.

Unlike the French who seem to have latched more persistently onto wine as a shining beacon of Gallic resistance and fortitude, for British and Dominion soldiers the relationship with drink during the war is often presented in much more melancholy terms.

Alcohol dependency, particularly among officers, was an occasional problem with men turning to the bottle as the stress of command pushed them to breaking point.

It was a problem that was tolerated, so long as it didn’t impair the individual’s capacity to perform his duty.

The Western Front as it is usually remembered. Australians at Passchendaele 1917

In RC Sherriff’s Journey’s End, the main character, captain Stanhope, is worn out and drinking heavily – something he hopes the new arrival, second lieutenant Raleigh, will not mention to his sister whom Stanhope is in love with.

When Stanhope’s company relieves another at the beginning of the play the departing company commander, Hardy, asks lieutenant Osborne: “How is the dear young boy? Drinking like a fish as usual?”

Osborne tells him how Stanhope has been in action since he was 18, “and because he’s stuck it till his nerves have got battered to bits, he’s called a drunkard.”

“Not a drunkard,” Hardy responds, “just a – just a hard drinker.”

After Osborne is killed in a trench raid Raleigh rounds on Stanhope for apparently sitting and enjoying himself with the other officers. Stanhope then admits he drinks to cope.

Raleigh: “And yet you can sit there and drink Champagne and smoke cigars –“

(…)

Stanhope: “To forget, you little fool – to forget! D’you understand? To forget! You think there’s no limit to what a man can bear?”

Suicide was not as common as might be supposed given the circumstances but Sassoon mentioned both it and the lack of rum’s part in it, in his poem, Suicide in the Trenches:

“I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

“In winter trenches cowed and glum,
with crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.”

Like their forebears in the 17th century, British soldiers were given an extra tot of rum before going over the top for either a raid or larger offensive. One veteran recalled the air on the first day of the battle of the Somme smelling thickly of, “rum and blood”, while Maurice Searle of the 18th Battalion (Essex Scottish), a Canadian regiment, remembered that the only way the men kept going during the battle of Passchendaele in 1917 was, “more than ordinary issues of rum”.

Yet if the ration wasn’t enough in ordinary moments then many soldiers no doubt thought it wasn’t enough when one was just about to put one’s life on the line. In Richard Holmes’ book Tommy he quotes one soldier who wrote that if the ration, “is supposed to give us Dutch courage. It might fulfill its purpose if it were handed out in more liberal doses.”

The purpose of the ration was not to get troops drunk before an attack but, of course, over-proof alcohol and weaponry are not best bed fellows and coupled with a commander who may already be alcohol dependent the results could be disastrous; sometimes therefore officers and NCOs would withhold the rum until the attack was completed – though one Canadian corporal who tried to withhold his section’s rum before an attack recalled being threatened at gunpoint by the waiting men so that he was forced to serve it out anyway.

Confronted with fear, desperation and the world’s first taste of unrelenting mechanised warfare, it is little surprise that, for better or worse, alcohol became a unifying and stabilising factor for “Tommy” as he struggled to survive and maintain a semblance of sanity.

The ration may have been irregular but both it and a sense of humour ensured the army, despite the occasional wobble, never cracked en masse.

“Without it,” one medical officer in the Black Watch famously remarked, “I doubt we would have won the war.”

An enlightening and in-depth look at the use of rum in the Canadian Army during WW1 (and applicable to all British and Dominion forces) to which the author is indebted can be found here.